"Monotonous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... A very monotonous cruise was this one. Anticipating as much, I bought a melodeon at Halifax, and in my evening watch below would play some of Sankey's hymns. The men were only too glad to sing, and presently the whole mess deck ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... Eastthorpe, it will be remembered, is on the border between the low uplands and the Fens, and has one side open to soft, swelling hills. Fenmarket is entirely in the Fens, and all the roads that lead out of it are alike level, monotonous, straight, and flanked by deep and stagnant ditches. The river, also, here is broader and slower; more reluctant than it is even at Eastthorpe to hasten its journey to the inevitable sea. During the greater part of the year the visitor to Fenmarket ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... flanks walked tall men, who flung over the low-headed cattle an admonitory lash whose keen report presently could be heard, still faint and far off. A dull dust cloud arose, softening the outlines of the prairie ships. The broad gestures of arm and trunk, the monotonous soothing of commands to the sophisticated kine as yet remained vague, so that still it was properly a picture done on a vast canvas—that of the frontier in '48; a picture of might, of inevitableness. Even the sober souls of these waiters rose to ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... Baines represented Leeds as successor to Mr. Macaulay, and as representative of that town was one of the most useful members of parliament. He was not a man of refined bearing or mental cultivation; as a public speaker he was ungainly in manner, his pronunciation common and provincial, his voice monotonous, and his style dry and commonplace; but he was serviceable, practical, pertinent, experienced; and the soundness of his judgment, and the weight of his character, gave force to what he said. His son, Matthew Baines, Esq., a barrister, became a member of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... drew together in a puzzled, frowning line as he asked himself this question, and he moved restlessly. He was becoming impatient; the chanting of the monks grew monotonous to his ears; the lighted cross on the altar dazzled him with its glare. Moreover he disliked all forms of religious service, though as a lover of classic lore it is probable he would have witnessed a celebration in honor of Apollo or Diana with the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of the taller of the twin poplars that flanked the picket gate opening upon the Gwynnes' little garden sat a robin, his head thrown back to give full throat to the song that was like to burst his heart, monotonous, unceasing, rapturous. On the door step of the Gwynnes' house, arrested on the threshold by the robin's song, stood the Gwynne boy of ten years, his eager face uplifted, himself poised ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... prerogative, which so eminently distinguishes us from the rest of the animal creation. The dog, the cat, the horse, the bear, the lion, all of them have voice. But we may almost consider this as their reproach. They can utter for the greater part but one monotonous, eternal sound. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... take branding irons, and use them to mark each of their camping-places with its number. This is especially useful in Australian travel, where the country is monotonous, and there are few natives to tell ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... As their monotonous chant rose high, Nazu was rushed to the edge of the pit. The ghastly, shimmering heat-ghost drifted hungrily to await the flinging of the slight form into its consuming embrace. Carr was glad to see that Ora ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... more struck than upon this occasion by the inexhaustible variety and extent of his information. He is not so agreeable as such powers and resources ought to make any man, because the vessel out of which it is all poured forth is so ungraceful and uncouth; his voice unmusical and monotonous, his face not merely inexpressive but positively heavy and dull, no fire in his eye, no intelligence playing round his mouth, nothing which bespeaks the genius and learning stored within and which burst out with such extraordinary force. It ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... jealousy expressed by Don Garcia is neither sufficiently terrible to frighten, nor ridiculous enough to amuse the audience; he always speaks and acts as a prince, and hence, he sometimes becomes royally monotonous. ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... at that, never removing your eyes from it for a moment, and see what happens." And, thus saying, the man went and squatted himself upon his heels in the centre of the floor, and began to chant, in a low, monotonous voice, certain words the meaning of which ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... surviving records of the court-martial with which we are concerned go to show that he was certainly not a gifted speaker. His vocabulary was limited, his rhetoric clumsy, and Major Carruthers denounces his delivery as halting, his very voice dull and monotonous; also his manner, reflecting his mind on this occasion, appears to have been perfectly unimpassioned. He had been saddled with a duty and he must perform it. He would do so conscientiously to the best of his ability, for he seems to ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... gather, and gather, and gather, Until they crowd the sky, And listen, in breathless silence, To the solemn litany. It begins in rocky caverns, As a voice that chants alone To the pedals of the organ In monotonous undertone; And anon from shelving beaches, And shallow sands beyond, In snow-white robes uprising The ghostly choirs respond. And sadly and unceasing The mournful voice sings on, And the snow-white ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... lengthening, wrapped in thought, unheeding what was taking place around him. This worried her a great deal, and a new sense of responsibility began to shape itself in her mind. She believed that he missed his old home in Connecticut more than he would acknowledge, and that he was wearying of the monotonous life in the wilderness. Perhaps he needed a change, and she wondered how this ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... soul; I think it full of deep pathos and beauty. All I wish away is the marriage hymn at the end, and that for every reason I wish away—it's a discord in the music. The monotony is a part of the position—(the sea is monotonous, and so is lasting grief.) Your complaint is against fate and humanity rather than against the poet Tennyson. Who that has suffered has not felt wave after wave break dully against one rock, till brain and heart, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... but languorous, wistful, haunting, as if it eternally pursued, through the fugitive seasons, an immortal and ineffable beauty. The enchanted crystal had been shattered in an instant, and she saw life now, not imprisoned in magical sunshine, but gray, sordid, monotonous, as utterly hopeless as the faces thronging in Broadway. Yet not many months ago she had seen in these, same faces the inward hope, the joy in sadness, the gaiety in disappointment, which had brightened the world for her. Then she had been aware of an invisible current flowing from the ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... respectable families. On sunny afternoons there were the same groups of clerics and military airing themselves in the Bombe. The great bells of the cathedral continued to peal at certain hours, when old lady-devotees were seen hastily wending their way to the service of the rosary, or nones, and the monotonous voice of the canons sounded solemnly in the silence of the ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... bore up against the flatness and sameness of our lives. The sea, of all things, grows heavy and wearing to people whose constitutions are not capable of drinking in health and elasticity from its exhilarating breezes. There is nothing so monotonous as the wailing and lashing sea, especially in the night time, when darkness covers it, and its presence is announced only by that eternal surging and moaning of the waters which strike upon the invalided fancy like the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... curious, hard physical labour! One actually stops thinking. I often work long without any thought whatever, so far as I know, save that connected with the monotonous repetition of the labour itself—down with the spade, out with it, up with it, over with it—and repeat. And yet sometimes—mostly in the forenoon when I am not at all tired—I will suddenly have a sense as of the world opening around me—a sense of its beauty and ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... of an opportunity to stretch their legs, and then they tried their luck at fishing, also. After a time this became monotonous for the active young ones, and they started up the Creek to adventure. The Third Lake Creek came down over moss-covered rocks, which were held in place by gnarled roots of giant trees. These ancient foresters stood looking benignly down upon the placid waters of the lake, as if watching the ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... I cannot remember, nor is it of any importance. He was not an intellectual man, nor had he many gifts beyond his rather sleek manner and a soft manageable voice. He was obviously proud of that, and reckoned it an instrument of success. It became as monotonous to me as the slow oily swell of a tropic sea in calm. I would have preferred a Boanerges, a bitter John Knox. The intent of his sermon was the usual one at such periods; this was the end of the year, the beginning was at hand. Naturally he addressed himself to ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... seldom came in much before it was time to dress for dinner; but young men's habits are not usually very regular, the monotonous custom of doing everything by clockwork being a tedious concomitant of old age. Maud could not calculate on his absence at any particular hour of the day unless he were on duty, and the bare notion that she should wish thus to calculate ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... steamer was under way. He could, however, see nothing. A sort of shutter was fastened outside the scuttle, which gave him the opportunity to take a glimpse of the sky, but nothing of the shore or water. Nothing could be more monotonous than the journey, and yet the air and light that came down through the port-hole rendered it far more pleasant than existence in a prison cell. He knew, too, that, dull as it was in the cabin, there would be little to see on deck, for the shores of the rivers ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... but of that empty lie called drapery. The purpled silks of Titian's Lilac Lady, in the Pitti, the embroidered hems of Boccaccini da Cremona, the crimson velvet of Raphael's Joanna of Aragon, Veronese's cloth of silver and shot taffety, are replaced by one monotonous nondescript stuff, differently dyed in dull or glaring colors, but always shoddy. Characteristic costumes have disappeared. We shall not find in any of their Massacres of the Innocents a soldier like Bonifazio's Dall'Armi. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... till she has grown to perfect womanhood that he discovers that he has given his love to the daughter of his enemy. This is a noble story, but the workmanship, though good of its kind, is hardly adequate to the idea. The style lacks grace, movement and variety. It is correct but monotonous. Seriousness, like property, has its duties as well as its rights, and the first duty of a novel is to please. A Child of the Revolution hardly does that. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... echoed oddly clear and solitary above the incessant booming of the breakers and the monotonous ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... they came out or gone in to rest on the return. Stransom, besides, now faltered; he couldn't walk as of old. The omission made everything false; it was a dire mutilation of their lives. Our friend was frank and monotonous, making no mystery of his remonstrance and no secret of his predicament. Her response, whatever it was, always came to the same thing—an implied invitation to him to judge, if he spoke of predicaments, of how much comfort she had in hers. For him indeed was no comfort even ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... voice, with which the mind had little to do, but which kept time with the swaying of the ship and the faint lapping of the dark water, and resembled a vague improvization restrained, nevertheless, by sweet and monotonous forms." ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... darling Athens for the Peloponnesian war. These things Mr. Stoddard feels while the locomotive shrieks in his ears, while the omnibus, speeding to the steamship, rattles the glass of his window, while the newsboy cries his monotonous advertisement, or his servant hands to him a telegraphic dispatch; and he is right. The body in which Grecian art existed, is indeed dead, but the spirit which animated it is indestructible. There will be poets to worship ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... between him and the source of the Golden River. He entered on it with the boldness of a practised mountaineer; yet he thought he had never traversed so strange or so dangerous a glacier in his life. The ice was excessively slippery, and out of all its chasms came wild sounds of gushing water; not monotonous or low, but changeful and loud, rising occasionally into drifting passages of wild melody, then breaking off into short melancholy tones, or sudden shrieks, resembling those of human voices in distress ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... just left on the first preparatory stage of our homeward journey; and, far back on the inland level, a larger and loftier mass, the grove surrounding the great Paknam pagoda, was the only thing on which the eye could rest from the vain task of exploring the monotonous sweep of the horizon. Here and there gleams as of a few scattered pieces of silver marked the windings of the great river; and on the nearest of them, just within the bar, the tug steaming right into the land ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... on stupefaction; but the perpetual clatter of sabots and shoes in the passage kept the mind alert and the eyes open. The chorus of the wounded rose in gusts; there were always in the adjoining wards some dozen men wounded in the head, and suffering from meningitis, which provoked a kind of monotonous howling; there were men wounded in the abdomen, and crying out for the drink that was denied them; there were the men wounded in the chest, and racked by a low cough choked with blood... and all the rest who lay moaning, hoping for an ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... two other voices of lower pitch sing a monotonous refrain, 'Sing cuccu nu, Sing cuccu,' which they repeat ad infinitum till the four who sing the Round are tired. This refrain is called Pes (or 'foot'), and this is the kind of thing which Lucrece means ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... hours for the two first meals were gone by. Then he was awakened. He rose, descended to his shady walk, then came out a little into the sun, as if to partake its warmth for a minute with his absent child. And then the dismal, monotonous walk recommenced, until, quite exhausted, he regained the chamber and the bed, his domicile by choice. For several days the comte did not speak a single word. He refused to receive the visits that were paid him, and, during the night, he was seen to relight his ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... dancing. Dancing and drinking were the favorite pastimes of the Peruvians. These amusements continued for several days, though the sacrifices terminated on the first.—Such was the great festival of Raymi; and the recurrence of this and similar festivities gave relief to the monotonous routine of toil prescribed to the lower orders ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... audible; a far-off railway whistle was startling in its abruptness. In the midst of this calm the opening of the door of the salon, with the sudden uplifting of voices in the hall, told Paul that Yerba's guests were leaving. He heard Dona Anna's arch accents—arch even to Colonel Pendleton's monotonous baritone!—Milly's high, rapid utterances, the suave falsetto of Don Caesar, and HER voice, he thought a trifle wearied,—the sound of retiring footsteps, and ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... slightest attention or thought; the more fluently they read, the worse it is for them; for their preceptors, whilst words and sentences are pronounced with tolerable emphasis, never seem to suspect that the reader can be tired, or that his mind may be absent from his book. The monotonous tones which are acquired by children who read a great deal aloud, are extremely disagreeable, and the habit cannot easily be broken: we may observe, that children who have not acquired bad customs, always read as they speak, when they ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... receive the new ones, proceeded to lay them out. The new specimens had all to be examined by the addition to the botanical party, their botanical and vulgar names to be recited to her, and, then, the arranging began. This was too monotonous work for the Captain, who carried the children off for a romp on the verandah. Marjorie stayed for a minute or so after they were gone, and then remembered that she had not given papa his morning button-hole. Coristine ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... atmosphere, distinct and particular forms of treatment were necessary: others were established by convention. The question of length was left to the discretion of the musician, whose aim was not only to put the listener into a certain mood, but also to avoid rendering that mood monotonous by unduly protracting it. A further stage was reached when the interpretations of contrasted moods were made to follow one upon the other, and the charm of light and shade was discovered; and yet another step was made when the same piece of music was allowed to ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... it seems rather an odd life for an artist: at least it strikes one as a life, despite Haydn's own opinion, not particularly conducive to originality. To use extreme language, it might almost be called a monotonous and soporific mode of existence. Probably its chief advantage was the opportunity it afforded, or perhaps the necessity it enforced, of ceaseless industry. Certainly that industry bore fruit in Haydn's ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... proportion of his cosmos. Bobby listened to him while he spoke of the obvious motive for the deed; but when he began again, and in detail, to go over the evidence already adduced, Bobby ceased to listen. Only the monotonous cadences of the voice went on and on. The clock tick-tocked. People breathed. It reminded him ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... clever inventors, but let us remember this is only after they have spent long years studying the problem. In the case of the steam engine, however, a quite important improvement came very curiously. Humphrey Potter was a lad employed to turn off and on the stop cocks of a Newcomen engine, a monotonous task, for, at every stroke one had to be turned to let steam into the boiler and another for injecting the cold water to condense it, and this had to be done at the right instant or the engine could not move. How to relieve himself from the drudgery ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... though of a character somewhat uniformly rustic. Under everlasting groves is displayed an opulent and monotonous verdure, in the thickness of which contented-looking oxen ruminate. I can understand my coachman's twelve meals; the idea of eating must occur frequently and almost exclusively to the imagination of any man who spends his life in the midst of this rich nature, ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... come. I was driven out of my attic during the middle hours of the day, and the others found it pleasanter on the doubly shaded stoop than in their chambers. We were thus thrown more together than usual,—a circumstance which made our life more monotonous to the others, as I could see; but to myself, who could at last talk to Eunice, and who was happy at the very sight of her, this 'heated term' seemed borrowed from Elysium. I read aloud, and the sound of my own voice gave me confidence; many passages suggested ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... describe the voyage in detail. Africa, with all it meant, was behind us, England was before, and the intervening time, monotonous though it was, passed quickly with that absorbing thought. My chief impression is that of living in an eternal jostle; forming interminable queues outside canteens, washing-places, and stuffy hammock-rooms ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... a love quite separate from her affection for all the young souls in her charge, and secretly admired the strength of will which more than once had been pitted against her own; moreover, accustomed to the quiet monotonous passage of time, she suddenly realised that she needed someone young ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... and the police. Slowly the gorgeous State-coach lumbered up to the entrance of the ground railed off for the ceremony, —and between a line of armed guards, the King alighted. Vociferous cheering again broke out on all sides, which his Majesty acknowledged in the usual formal manner by a monotonous military salute performed at regular intervals. Received with obsequious deference by all the persons concerned in the Grand National Theatre project, he conversed with one or two, shook hands with ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... They take the evidence of Harding and the five Frenchmen with him. Besides, they haven't had a hanging yet, and they're keen for it. You see, things have been pretty monotonous. They haven't located anything big, and they got tired of hunting for Surprise Lake. They did some stampeding the first part of the winter, but they've got over that now. Scurvy is beginning to show up amongst them, too, and they're ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... the voice of the auctioneer, in constant and monotonous repetition, interrupted at intervals by the smart rap of his ivory mallet. I knew that the sale was going on; and, by the frequent strokes of the hammer, I could tell that it was rapidly progressing. ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... the dreams and thoughts that set us free from sordidness, that teach our minds versatility and sympathy, that create for us hobbies and avocations of worth, that rest and refresh us. If we must be ocean liners all day, plodding between known and monotonous ports, at least we may be tramp ships at night, cargoed with strange stuffs and trafficking for lonely and ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... wounded men. The Kursaal is built in terraces and galleries going all round the front and side of it. I took the wrong turning round one of them and found myself in the doorway of an immense ward. From somewhere inside there came loud and lacerating screams, high-pitched but appallingly monotonous and without intervals. I thought it was a man in delirium; I even thought it might be poor Fisher, of whose attacks we had ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... Lillian found something peculiar about her. It was not the somewhat foreign dress and ornaments she wore; it was in her face, her movements, and the tone of her voice, for as she walked she sang a low, monotonous song, as if unconsciously. Lillian watched her keenly, marking the aimless motions of the little hands, the apathy of the lovely face, and the mirthless accent of the voice; but most of all the vacant fixture of the great dark eyes. Around and around she went, with ...
— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott
... salmon goes to smoke his pipe after meals. Get such a stream amid fields of breast-high crops surrounded by hills of pines, throw in where you please quiet water, long-fenced meadows, and a hundred-foot bluff just to keep the scenery from growing too monotonous, and you will get some faint notion of the Clackamas. The weir had been erected to pen the Chenook salmon from going further up-stream. We could see them, twenty or thirty pounds, by the score in the deep pools, or flying madly against the weir and ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... earnest, uncompromising men are more or less open to the charge of narrowness. A man is narrow when he concentrates himself upon a point; even a cannon-shot is. Whitman was narrow in the sense that he was at times monotonous; that he sought but few effects, that he poured himself out mainly in one channel, that he struck chiefly the major chords of life. His "Leaves" do not show a great range of artistic motifs. A versatile, many-sided nature he certainly was not; a large, broad, tolerant ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... was solidarity. It defied earthquakes. It was planted for a thousand years. The honest concrete was overlaid by a cream-stucco of honest cement. Again, this very sameness of color might have proved monotonous to the eye had it not been saved by the many flat ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... landscape was covered with a deep snow that was evenly distributed over hollow and hill alike—the lower lying land and the higher eminences so running into one another that they could not be distinguished. The tops of the loftiest peaks, indeed, seemed to be dwarfed down to the monotonous level of the plain; and, where elevated at all, they resembled more a cluster of little round mounds like sugar- loaves ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... nights now lingered slowly along while the captives were perishing in monotonous misery. The severity of their imprisonment was continually increased by new deprivations. No communications from the world without were permitted to reach their ears. Shutters were so arranged that even the sky was scarcely visible, and no employment whatever was allowed them to beguile ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... but quietly, for the darkness and silence which reigned outside their little shelter, and the monotonous lapping of the waves made them drowsy; and one by ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... more wan and wretched than any we had encountered yet. No songs of birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and shadows from swift passing clouds. Hour after hour, the changeless glare of the hot, unwinking sky, shone upon the same monotonous objects. Hour after hour, the river rolled along, as wearily and slowly ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... a better lightning criticism of "Junius" and his style than that conveyed in Leaker's words. She had got the exact touch. "Junius," in truth, is not only empty for her, but empty for the whole world except as regards his style. There he is unquestionably great. Tumid, exaggerated, and monotonous as it often is, his style does affect one like wine. That is certainly how it affected, and still affects, me. Even at an age when I did not really know much more about the Duke of Grafton than did Leaker, and probably cared less, I had got the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... life was dull at Ehrenberg, it could not be called exactly monotonous. We were not obliged to seek our excitement outside; we had plenty of it, such as ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... broad horizon above the lake was piled deep with clouds. Beyond the oak trees, in the southern sky, great tongues of flame shot up into the dark heavens out of the blast furnaces of the steel works. Deep-toned, full-throated frogs had begun their monotonous chant. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... that across the vast and vacant sea! Now and then a distant sail glimmered upon the horizon, but disappeared like a vanishing snowflake. The equator was crossed; the air grew colder; storm and calm followed each other; the daily entry now becomes monotonous. ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... and the main question ordered, the yeas and nays were called on the motion to reconsider—and the intense silence succeeding the monotonous calling of the names was broken by the voice of the Speaker declaring the motion to reconsider, carried, by 112 yeas ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... Governments it is the commonest. In France and all the best of the Continent it rules like a superstition. It is to no purpose that you prove that the pay of petty officials is smaller than mercantile pay; that their work is more monotonous than mercantile work; that their mind is less useful and their life more tame. They are still thought to be greater and better. They are decords; they have a little red on the left breast of their coat, and no argument will answer that. In England, ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... bided the coming winter. Chill rains drizzled over the gloomy 'clearing,' and drenched the palisades and log-built barracks, raw from the axe. Buried in the wilderness, the military exiles [Legardeur and his garrison] resigned themselves as they might to months of monotonous solitude; when, just after sunset on the eleventh of December, a tall youth [and he was only an inch shorter than Lincoln, six feet three inches] came out of the forest on horseback, attended by a companion ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... London with Squire Pinner to see those new agricultural implements—or whatever it is. They are sure to be away as much as three days. I was thinking if we could but persuade mamma to come to us for the time papa is to be away, it would be a delightful little change for her—a break in her monotonous life." ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... was slowly dressing, he was suddenly aware of the sound of a woman's voice speaking or reading—he fancied from its monotonous cadence that it must be the latter—in some room that could not be far away from his own chamber. In those days such an accomplishment as reading was not at all common to the inhabitants of a farm, and Paul stood ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... been a very pathetic scene in the church at East Barnet which few of those present could have witnessed without emotion. The clerk was a man of advanced age. He always conducted the singing, which must have been somewhat monotonous, as the 95th and the 100th Psalm (Old Version) were invariably sung. On one occasion, after several vain attempts to begin the accustomed melody, the poor old man exclaimed, "Well, my friends, it's no use. I'm too old. I ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... childhood, what she had heard revealed in the most skillful feminine dissections, had cleared her understanding to a point that made the advances of hopeful men quite entertainingly obvious. Their method was appallingly similar and monotonous. She liked, rather than not, the younger ones, whose confidence that their passion was something new on earth at times refreshed her; but the navigated materialism of greater experience finally became distasteful. She ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... tell you, it is not Hartmann, but Hartung: now, repeat it after me—not Hartmann, but Hartung.' Then Lampe, looking sulky, and drawing himself up with the stiff air of a soldier on guard, and in the very same monotonous tone with which he had been used to sing out his challenge of—Who goes there? would roar—'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' 'Now again!' Kant would say: on which again Lampe roared—'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' 'Now ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... puffing and blowing as he removed his heavy boots before entering the sacred premises. On other occasions, at nightfall, when he was returning to the hotel, downcast at having discovered nothing at the mosque or the baths, he would hear, as he passed one of the Moorish houses, monotonous songs, the muffled sound of guitars, the rattle of tambourines and the light laughter of women, which made his heart beat faster. "Perhaps she is there" He would say to himself, and approaching the house he would lift the heavy knocker and ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... almost with a feeling of irritability that he heard the quick sharp note of the "Whip-poor-will," as she flew from bough to bough of an old withered tree beside him. Another, and again another of these midnight watchers took up the monotonous never-varying cry of "Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will;" and then came forth, from many a hollow oak and birch, the spectral night-hawk from hidden dens, where it had lain hushed in silence all day, from dawn till sunset. Sometimes their sharp hard wings almost swept his cheek ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... carriage made its way but very slowly, and after the lapse of two hours the travellers had arrived at a point about eight miles from the castle, at which the road strikes through a desolate and heathy flat, sloping up distantly at either side into bleak undulatory hills, in whose monotonous sweep the imagination beholds the heaving of some dark sluggish sea, arrested in its first commotion by some preternatural power. It is a gloomy and divested spot; there is neither tree nor habitation near it; its monotony is unbroken, except by here and there the grey front of a rock peering ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... largely at once but gradually grow into it. I know what it is to be on the farm and work hard day after day; there is no chance for us under the old conditions; but in higher forms of agriculture or horticulture the American people will find the greatest benefits and pleasures. It gets monotonous for a man who has a profession to stick to that all the time, day in and day out without change, week in and week out, year in and year out, and he gets to driving in a rut. If he will take up a side line it will do him much good. I have gone into nut growing for recreation, not profit, and I think ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... carpeted with short green grass and bordered with acacia-bushes covered with feathery leaves and a profusion of yellow ball-shaped flowers that perfumed the air with their fragrance. The view up and down these winding flower-bordered streams was lovely. We rode for miles over this monotonous country, gradually rising to higher ground. Suddenly, almost at our very feet, a little bowl-shaped valley about half a mile in circumference opened to view. The upper rim all around was covered with smooth green grass, and the sides were hidden by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... on, with the paces of the horses at a slow walk growing monotonous in the extreme; and for some time past the excitement of the flight had been giving place to the first approaches of a drowsiness that was rapidly becoming invincible, when with a faint cry of joy the lad noticed, as he looked off to ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... her as possible that if he were going to fall in love with her at all, that catastrophe should be postponed beyond six months from their first acquaintance. Nor did it seem extraordinary to her that she should actually look forward to those visits, and take pleasure in that monotonous intercourse. Her life was very quiet; it was natural that she should take whatever diversion came in her way, and should even be thankful for it. Mr. Juxon was an honest gentleman, a scholar and a man ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... outbursts of ill-temper. Nobody ever knew what his wife had to endure in secret; her calm and restrained manner must have effectually hidden the constant anxiety of her life; nor had she children to warm her heart, and brighten up her monotonous existence. Little Charles, of the Reading-book, who is bid to come hither, who counted so nicely, who stroked the pussy cat, and who deserved to listen to the delightful stories he was told, was not her own son but her brother's child. When he was born, she wrote to entreat that he might be ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... the hopeless exigencies of the occasion. With the exception of that whited sepulchre, all was neat, artistic, eminently habitable. She surveyed it critically: the "Mona Lisa," the large "Melrose Abbey," the Burne-Jones draperies, and the "Blessed Damozel" that spread a placid if monotonous culture through the rooms of educated single women. A proper appreciation of polished wood, the sanitary and aesthetic values of the open fire, a certain scheme in couch-pillows, all linked it to ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... I write, the rain of an English April pours down; the sky is leaden and cold, the houses in front of me are almost terrible in their monotonous greyness, the slate roofs are shining with the wet. Now and again people pass: a woman of the slums in a dirty apron, her head wrapped in a grey shawl; two girls in waterproofs, trim and alert notwithstanding the inclement weather, one with a music-case under her arm. ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... a practiced mountaineer; yet he thought he had never traversed so strange or so dangerous a glacier in his life. The ice was excessively slippery; and out of all its chasms came wild sounds of gushing water: not monotonous or low, but changeful and loud, rising occasionally into drifting passages of wild melody, then breaking off into short, melancholy tones, or sudden shrieks, resembling those of human voices in distress or pain. The ice was broken into thousands of confused shapes, but ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... taken to deal with this great evil, which has made the town of Amritsar and other parts of the district liable to serious outbreaks of fever. There are two small riverain tracts on the Bias and Ravi and a poor piece of country in Ajnala flooded by the Sakki. The main part of the district is a monotonous plain of fertile loam. The two western tahsils, Amritsar and Tarn Taran, are prosperous, Ajnala is depressed. The rainfall is moderate averaging 21 or 22 inches, and the large amount of irrigation makes the harvests secure. The chief crops ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... sat talking till the fire-bells ceased their monotonous and ominous clang, and the late dawn of a winter morning reddened the eastern sky. It was half-past nine o'clock when they met again at their breakfast; yet late as it was, Mr. Danby, usually a very early riser, was not quite ready for it. ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... said, 'and a monotonous life; but I must have her near me. I must keep her near me. If the thought that I may die and leave my darling, or that my darling may die and leave me, comes like a spectre, to distress my happiest hours, and is ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... any kind of outline in a woodcut; but the rough sketch, Fig. 33., is enough to give an idea of its arrangement. The aim of the painter has been to give the intensest expression of repose, together with the enchanted lulling, monotonous motion of cloud and wave. All the clouds are moving in innumerable ranks after the sun, meeting towards the point in the horizon where he has set; and the tidal waves gain in winding currents upon the sand, with that stealthy ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the number he sought was a five-story structure of gray stone, and had evidently once been a home of wealth; but the manufacturing district had long since encroached on the region and it now was the only residence remaining in the midst of monotonous blocks of houses of industry. In fact, at dusk—the time at which Ben Stubbs paid his first visit to it—the neighborhood was practically deserted, as the factory hands who worked there during the day had all gone home and they lived in ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... of occupation does not leave me a moment of repose, he overpowers me by his uselessness; his idle life positively wears me out. His two eyes always open and gazing at mine compel me to keep them lowered. Then his monotonous remarks: ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... was something vividly impressive about her just now, though her pallid, prematurely mature face and the thin figure in the regulation black dress and white apron showed ordinarily only insignificant. "Tell me now," she repeated, with a monotonous emphasis that somehow moved Sarah to obedience against her will, greatly to ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... on, and the Green family overslept each morning, Rusty began to grow very weary of the monotonous "Cuckoo! cuckoo!" which came every half hour, all day long, through the kitchen ...
— The Tale of Rusty Wren • Arthur Scott Bailey
... reaching the capital were by springless cart over the grey alkali plains, or by boat along the Grand Canal. Both were slow; neither was enjoyable, but since the latter perhaps presented fewer discomforts, Robert Hart chose to spend a week in the monotonous scenery of mudbanks, and land at Tungchow, a little town some fifteen miles from his destination. Thence he made his way over a roughly paved stone causeway—one of those roads that the Chinese proverb ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... the human face and form, of thought, feeling and affection, we do not need gorgeous apparel to distinguish us. Moreover, if it is fitting that woman should dress in every color of the rainbow, why not man also? Clergymen, with their black clothes and white cravats, are quite as monotonous as the Quakers." Whatever may be the abstract merit of this argument, it is certain that the simplicity of Lucretia Mott's nature, is beautifully expressed by ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... end. The coming of the Watchman, who has evidently been aroused by the noise, is foretold by his horn. The crowd is seized with a panic. All the brawlers disappear behind doors. The sleepy Watchman stares about him in amazement, rubs his eyes, sings the monotonous chant which publishes the hour of the night, continues on his round, and the moon shines on a quiet street in Nuremberg as ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... lightly, "that's hardly worth talking about. I'll strike something. So long as you're pretty active there's generally work to be had, and when it grows monotonous you pull ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... admit that the withdrawal of stimuli, or their monotonous repetition, are factors which do undoubtedly stand out as primary causes of sleep. We may suppose, if we like, that consciousness depends upon a certain rate of vibration which takes place in the brain structure. This vibration is maintained by the stimuli of the present, which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... drag of two or three seconds between numbers, there was not a change in the figure of the girl. She still lay with her back turned on him, and the only expressive part that showed was her hand. First it lay limp against her hip, but as the monotonous count proceeded ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... recited alternately, in a monotonous voice, with an odd gravity, the points in a sort ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France
... reaction may be devastating. But it's a sign of grace that they've at last discovered sufficient intelligence to be bored with their somewhat monotonous selves. And Mrs. Oglethorpe always does exactly as she pleases. Better ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... sail to break its wide expanse, with never a sound to break our solitude, save the sullen murmuring wash of the surf as it rippled up on the beach, and the heavy, deep-drawn sigh of the water as it rolled back to its parent ocean, taking its weary load of pebbles and sand below, as if sick of the monotonous task, which it was doomed to continue on without cessation, with ever and for ever the same motion, now that its wild, brief orgy was o'er, and its regular routine of duty ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... her firmness or obstinacy, which represented in her case what would have been gesture and action in another, as she replied with her deliberate strength of speech: 'No, sir, I do not forget. To lead a life as monotonous as mine has been during many years, is not the way to forget. To lead a life of self-correction is not the way to forget. To be sensible of having (as we all have, every one of us, all the children of Adam!) ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... a monotonous, wind-swept plain, slightly undulating, its higher parts not even 500 feet above sea level. To the northward and eastward it descends gradually into the still lower lands of East Prussia and White Russia, but in the south it lifts into the foothills ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... seeds in their calabashes. They were trying to appease the dread deity of Thunder, as did their Inca ancestors. The voice of the old priest led the worship, and for four hours there was no cessation of the monotonous song, except when he performed some mystic ceremony ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... shabby, weather-beaten figure was uppermost, saw this figure reach for and grasp the heavy cane, saw the long arm rise and fall, heard a muffled groan, a sharp cry, a shout of agony; but the long arm rose and fell untiring, merciless, until all sounds were hushed save for a dull moaning and the monotonous sound of blows. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... The monotonous forest of trees became indistinct; for half an hour the rain fell in sheets—ghostly white in the dusk. It became difficult now to evade the roots and holes. It grew colder, yet there was no breeze. ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... that time is fast approaching for the American people. They must either seize the chance of a better future, or else become a nation which is satisfied in spirit merely to repeat indefinitely the monotonous measures ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... near the pass, miles of Arctic wastes bared themselves. All about towered bald domes, while everywhere stretched the monotonous white, the endless snow unbroken by tree or shrub, pallid and menacing, maddening to ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... many are unable to move their elbows. Take away the friar, gentlemen, and you will see how the Philippine edifice will totter; lacking robust shoulders and hairy limbs to sustain it, Philippine life will again become monotonous, without the merry note of the playful and gracious friar, without the booklets and sermons that split our sides with laughter, without the amusing contrast between grand pretensions and small brains, without the actual, daily representations of the tales of Boccaccio and La Fontaine! Without the ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... on. It did go on! Their voices were monotonous, thick, emphatic. They were harshly pompous, like men in the smoking-compartments of Pullman cars. They did not bore Carol. They frightened her. She panted, "They will be cordial to me, because my man belongs to their tribe. God help me if I ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... had been accustomed to this monotonous life by his first queen, and he did not care for any other. The new Queen, upon arriving, soon found this out, and found also that if she wished to rule him, she must keep him in the same room, confined as he had been kept by her predecessor. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... I am not speaking now about their resolutions on trade questions, which they thoroughly understand, but about resolutions on such subjects as foreign politics, the Army and Navy, and Colonial and Imperial questions, resolutions which are always upon the same monotonous lines. I do not believe that the working classes are the unpatriotic, anti-national, down-with-the-army, up-with-the-foreigner, take-it-lying-down class of Little Englanders that they are constantly represented to be. I do not believe it for a moment. I have ...
— Constructive Imperialism • Viscount Milner |
